Tuesday, June 25, 2013

The Land of Rainbows

I decided to play with contact paper for my spread in Lorraine's "Colors of the Rainbow" book--and glitter. Lots and lots of glitter. Call me crazy.

I began with a cut-out arc for my rainbow. It was tricky gluing the back of the contact paper to the cut out page and then trying to control these seven segments of different colored glitter without getting it all over the sticky side of the page. It was too challenging to evenly divide the arc into seven equal sections, so I simply eyeballed it. I figured when you look at a rainbow, the colors sort of melt into each other. My rainbow sort of resembles that. I was surprised how festive it turned out. That glitter was even more sparkly than I realized!

This spread was created as the ideas flowed out of me. It was not by any means a well-planned, thought-out and executed spread. I usually have an idea to start, but I kept adding to this spread little by little until at last it was done.

Ok, so what next? This spread needed something. I added the words of a popular local song "where I live...there are rainbows." Still not quite done. I have always liked the look of a cut-out page edge. I took a punch that reminded me of a cloud shape and created a border that mimics that shape.

But it still didn't feel done. So I asked, what makes rainbows? The sun shining through the raindrops! So there was my idea to create a sun shining behind the rainbow. I used the same technique to cut out a sun and its rays on the pages behind the rainbow pages. I took lemon-yellow glitter and carefully sandwiched it between two sheets of contact paper.

The finishing touch (of course) was the raindrops. I realized I could not use the same contact paper technique to created the raindrops of the left side of the page because I had already glued that page together. Fortunately, I had these turquoise blue metal raindrops which I sprinkled over the page.